In the name of the Merciful,
2. The meek shall inherit the earth and shall delight (Ps 37:7).
3. Great peace unto them who love your Torah (Ps 119:165).
4. To you, O prince, beloved and friend of my soul! Peace unto you, my people’s lord and confidant
5. whom mountains have raised up as a gift (teshurah)! I have sent you [this poem] to be a mantle.
6. If you please, let it be your mantle veil, wrap yourself and turn to its foundation
7. so that princes will consult you as an oracle (Jb 12:8) and poets will praise you for its splendor.
8. Verily, poetry is your eternal slave but the poems of others you enslave for your use!
9. May my poem be a friend of pure heart to you. Your heart hurt me by leaving;
10. it was connected to my heart all your days like a chain bound to a neck.
11. I delighted in your letter’s arrival; in your kindness you gave me a choice gift.51
12. The poem came and I was in awe of its treasure, and on Shelomoh Ibn Gabirol it was based!
13. I was astounded by your words, my friend, “Write a letter and send it along!”
14. How can I write while my heart is with you? Woe, on the day you left it was taken captive.
15. By departing you seized my innards and so my heart mourns.
16. Behold I cry and do not know if it is for my heart or for you!
17. My heart’s pain has grown with your separation and there is none to help.
18. [I am] tormented and have not found anyone pure of heart, intellect, or wisdom.
19. May God plant you in his garden as a pure seedling and reveal to us his beloved (the Messiah)!
20. May you delight in the knowledge of God and His splendor and enjoy the wisdom of His creation’s52 secret!
21. Then the poem will speak happiness for you, my prince, beloved and friend of my soul.
Following the poem, the letter continues with standard blessings, compliments for the recipient’s writing, and requests for further correspondence; as Goitein points out, the verso contains related content written in Judeo-Arabic.53 The letter is fascinating on a number of levels. First, it attests to the widespread fame of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry and the phenomenon of imitation (mu‘āraḍa, contrafaction), even among students of a young age. Second, it was not composed by a known or professional poet but represents the attempt of an “amateur”; the poem exhibits numerous literary merits (opening and closing with the same phrase, clever plays on biblical verses) but also has its shortcomings (misuse of gender in pronouns and frequent deviations in meter). Third, it demonstrates the clear epistolographic purpose of the poem and is a response to another poem that itself made up part of a letter. Finally, the author refers to his friend as a “gift” (teshurah) offered by the mighty mountains (4). What gift can one offer a “gift”? The answer, of course, is a poem, a panegyric, described here as a “mantle.” The friend’s letter is likewise described as a gift (9); this reference is proximate to the author’s dedication “May my poem be a friend of pure heart to you” (7); that is, the friend is a gift and the poem, the poet’s gift, is a friend. The epistolographic poem thus draws extensively upon the metapoetic discourse of gift exchange, a discourse expressing—indeed, constituting—the mutual bond of the correspondents.
Figure 7. Letter with panegyric by the talmid Yiṣḥaq Ibn Nissim Parsi for Abu Zikri Yiḥye Ibn Mevorakh. TS 13 J 19.21r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
In short, Jewish culture in the Islamic Mediterranean functioned according to a shared discourse of gift exchange across a range of social relationships—among poetic correspondents, poets receiving material remuneration and their beneficiaries, heads of academies and their communal adherents, among merchants and students. Of course, these relationships were hardly uniform. Some involved financial aspects while others exhibit nonmaterial exchanges of different sorts, but all were premised on reciprocal bonds that were expected to be cyclical and enduring. Although praise was not the only aspect of these relationships, it constituted a “good” of great value, especially insofar as it could extend the mamdūḥ’s reputation before his peers.
The Rhetoric of Sacrifice
For the most part, the “gifts” referred to in the discussion above have been devoid of valences of sacrificial offering. In this concluding section, I consider the phenomenon of sacrificial language in the rhetoric of exchange relationships.54 The central question is whether the introduction of God as a third party and the dynamics of atonement substantially alter the picture we have depicted about the mutuality of human exchange relationships, particularly in light of the Maussian framework.55
In the letter that opened Chapter 1, Hai Gaon describes the contribution from Rav Yehudah Rosh ha-Seder as a “gift [that] will be considered by God an offering and sacrifice (minḥah ve-azkarah). He made it ransom for him for pardoning and atonement.” Play on the language of the sacrificial cult can also be far more extensive, as in the following letter by Shemuel Ben ‘Eli, which deals primarily with the appointment of Zekhariah Ben Barkhael to the rank of av bet din.56 Here the head of the Baghdad academy addresses the community to which Ben Barkhael was being dispatched: “That which arrived to us and him [Ben Barkhael] from you will be considered for you, our brethren, like a whole offering, like incense seasoned with salt, like a burnt offering, like a grain offering…. And when this letter arrives to you, read it in public with a sweet tongue … and a joyous voice.”57 “That which arrived” was, in all likelihood, a monetary contribution. What the community received in exchange, in addition to the presence of the sanctioned av bet din, was the letter itself, which was to be read aloud and intoned with beauty, thereby bringing glory upon the community and reinforcing its tie to the academy.
Did Ben ‘Eli or the recipients of the letter really believe that the monetary donation had expiatory power for the givers? Does using sacrificial language rather than the language of human gift exchange truly alter the way in which the donation was considered? That is, did Ben ‘Eli and the community both recognize that the donations were simply keeping the lights on (or the lamps lit, as it were) and read the language of sacrifice with ironic distance? Was the rhetoric a kind of inside joke among intellectuals, the kind of literary play for which the medieval Hebrew poets are famed (the language of sacrifice is, for example, exploited to describe the garden or the body of the beloved)?58 Or should we view this as a kind of cultural practice that created or reinforced some core value of medieval Jewish society? The answers to these questions are, of course, difficult to glean from the sources, but I will try to evaluate the function of this discursive phenomenon.
There is little doubt that the representation of monetary contributions as sacrifices is on some level rhetorical, but this does not mean that the rhetoric is necessarily empty. It conveys to the reader that giving money to the academy is a type of divine service, and it is arguable that the sacrificial metaphor may have been important for claims of the academy’s legitimacy. At the very least, the rhetoric allows the recipient of the letter to imagine something more complex than a two-party human exchange relationship but instead a three-party dynamic, whereby the academy head acts as a kind of mediator between the donor and God. Rather than participating in mutual back-scratching, both donor and recipient can act as though they are working together in a single cause, likely deepening the sense of embedded exchange. Thus we might ask whether the use of sacrificial language throws a proverbial wrench into the application of the Maussian framework in the study of medieval Jewish exchange practices.
Following a paradigm proposed for Late Antique Jewish culture by Seth Schwartz, Marina Rustow reflects upon medieval Jewish